Big Give Christmas Challenge: will you help WLT raise £120,000 in three days?

World Land Trust (WLT) is hoping to raise £120,000 in the next three days for essential nature conservation work. But, to meet this ambitious target, we need our supporters and the public to rally to the online Big Give Christmas Challenge from 6 – 8 December 2012.

The Big Give Christmas Challenge matches public online donations against money from its Charity Champion Fund and advance pledges from WLT supporters.

This means that if WLT can raise £60,000 online in three days, the final total can be double that.

But there’s a catch. The match funding is limited and distributed on a first come first served basis. Once the daily allocation of funding has been exhausted, matching will pause until 10am the following day.

On your marks

The race is on! The earlier a donation is made each morning after 10am, starting on Thursday 6 December, the greater the chance that the donation will be matched.

The quicker WLT can reach its target of £60,000 from public donations, the more likely the Trust is to have the full £60,000 matched pound for pound.

Online donations of between £5 and £5,000 are welcome, and every little helps.

Keepers of the Wild

Funds raised from the Big Give Christmas Challenge will go towards the Trust’s Keepers of the Wild programme.

Introduced in 2010, the Keepers of the Wild programme enables WLT’s partner conservation organisations to provide and support wardens for WLT-funded reserves. WLT is aiming to fund an increasing number of rangers, so more funds are urgently needed to help protect reserves from poaching, illegal hunting and logging.

If WLT meets its target of raising £120,000 in three days, the funds will provide core funding for Keepers of the Wild over the next two years.

WLT protects the world’s most biologically important and threatened habitats acre by acre. Since its foundation in 1989, WLT has funded partner organisations around the world to create nature reserves. Keepers are essential for the ongoing protection of habitat and wildlife in WLT funded reserves.

Comments

I noted a running out of cash perilously early on all three days. I got my donation in and matched but I took your advice seriously, hitting the site good and early on Thursday!

I'm still inclined to bellyache about the 'Big' bit of this whole event; us punters continue to have more money than the organisers for match-funding up and ready. And they make us scrabble in steep competition with other charities to have it doubled despite all the hype. Er, and the 4% handling fee.

On the whole we're happy with the Big Give this year. The site didn't crash as last year and although we didn't reach our target of £120,000 we did raise £89,000 from the Big Give and have received offline donations as well from people who don't use computers. We feel fairly confident that one way or another we will raise the £120,000 we had set ourselves.

As you say, the big disappointment was that the Reed Foundation matched funds dried up by 11am on each of the three mornings. We don't know the reasons as yet but will be looking in to it as we do know that it deterred several donors (that we know of, and there may be many others) when they saw that their donation wouldn't be matched.

Despite the glitches the Big Give does give us an opportunity to focus fundraising for three days for a specific purpose and to raise what are, afterall, substantial funds. Thanks to everyone who supported the Big Give this year and worked so hard to get their funds matched!